


in all the ways we've ended up here

by guiltylights



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: All the ghosts just legitimately all the ghosts in the series for this fic, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-12 23:16:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5685250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guiltylights/pseuds/guiltylights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because we're ghosts, and happy endings didn't happen, for people like us. –– one-shot series; imagined backstories of ghosts in Danny Phantom. Two: The Box Ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. curdling like sour milk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The kitchen was all she had. –– The Lunch Lady ghost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve had the idea for this one-shot series for about two years, probably, but I’ve never really got around to starting it. But since my obsession with Danny Phantom is resurfacing, I’d thought I’d start it now.
> 
> Also note the title of this chapter has nothing to do with everything.

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            She had been the Casper High School’s cafeteria lunch lady, somewhere between the fifties and the sixties, and she had absolutely loved her job.

            It was a fairly simple one, really. It had a regular and constant schedule that never really changed: Thursday was always meatloaf day, and Tuesday was always chicken casserole, and on Mondays there was always a special dessert of buttercream cake with pudding in the middle if the kids had been quick and finished up their lunches early. She had an especially light touch when it came to the buttercream, and she didn’t mean to brag, but she probably made it better than any of the other lunch ladies that came before her. 

            This was what she was good at, and this was what she was proud of: in an obscure school tucked away in the unknown town of Amity Park she smiles kindly at every child passing behind the lunch counter and offers them today’s special, and she is content, she is at peace.

– 

            There had been some rumours going around the school recently.

            Normally she doesn’t concern herself that much with rumours, but this one floats around the cafeteria like the whisper of a ghost, thin-wispy and just as intangible, and it hangs in the air like hazy smoke that just won’t go away. There’s word around the school that there was going to be a new cafeteria menu change, and that the school was going to review the current cafeteria food list and redo it so that it would be healthier and better for the students.

            She dismisses the notions as ridiculous. Why would they possibly change the menu? It was perfectly healthy as it is, with good healthy wholesome food to fill the kids right up. She’s seen the smiles on the children’s faces when they bit into her meatloaf or when they had a taste of her roast beef; they liked their food, and she saw no reason why the school would change the menu when there was no complaints. The rumours were obviously all completely untrue.

            She smiles out affectionately across the cafeteria from behind the lunch counter, and contentedly hums an old tune. 

            “Ah, Mallory!” A voice calls out from behind her, and she turns around to find the principal of the school, Mr Ronalds, standing in the kitchen beaming at her. 

            She smiles, and straightens out her apron over her pink uniform before she walks forward to greet the head of the school and her employer. “Mr Ronalds,” she says kindly, her voice quavering the way all elderly people’s voices do. It was a warm high quaver, kindly like fresh homemade cookies and sitting by the fireplaces, and she holds Mr Ronalds’ hand with her own yellow-gloved one and shakes it once, twice. Mr Ronalds smiles once at the greeting, before he pulls away and straightens out his own tweed suit, business-like and friendly all at once.     

            “How are you, Mallory?” He asks politely.

            “I am perfectly well, Mr Ronalds. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

            “Please, call me Roger. We’ve known each other for too long.”

            She laughs. “Oh dear, no, I could hardly bear to call my own employer by his personal name. What brings you to my kitchen?”

            “Ah, yes, well, I was just popping by to see how you were doing.” Mr Ronalds adjusts his glasses and peers around the kitchen, his eyes scanning the impeccably clean workplace and the neatly organized food stacks, as well as the various prepared meals lined up at the lunch counter.

            She waits standing in front of him as he does a sweeping check-through of the kitchen, hands clasped in front of her, feet together, the very picture of patience personified. She is proud of her kitchen. She has tended to it for nearly twenty years now, it was her pride and joy, and she has never kept it anything less than perfectly well tended in all the twenty years she’d been here. She is sure there is nothing her employer could find wrong in her kitchen.    

            But as she watches his eyes flash with something unreadable, and when he glances at her there was an expression of calculation in his gaze.

            “As you can see, I am doing alright,” she says politely, even so, and she tugs at her apron, smoothing down the wrinkles in an effort the hide the sudden tremble of uncertainty in her fingers. “Everything here is perfectly under control.”

            She raises hazel eyes and meets Mr Ronalds’ gaze, and she stands her ground even as his eyes flash again behind his glasses. But barely a second later Mr Ronalds is a picture of friendliness again, and she lets go of the breath that she didn't know she was holding.

            “Yes, of course, Mallory. I’d expect nothing less from you. Keep up the good work!” Mr Ronalds beams out before he hustles himself out of the doors, and the doors swing shut behind him with a soft _whumpf_ of air.

            She stares at the doors closing after him, and tried to shake off the sense of foreboding in her stomach.

– 

            Something’s been happening.

            Lately, the children have been complaining of the lunch food being too salty, or not salted enough, or too bland, too strong. They say the cafeteria food standard has been dropping, and how it wasn’t as good as it used to be.

            She is frantic. She spends sleepless nights awake in bed worrying about her food. What is she doing wrong? She was sure she was making her food the same way as before, so what was the issue? Was it the new kind of salt the school got? The chicken from a different supplier? What exactly was the problem?

            She’s getting old. She’s fifty-one and still working as Casper High’s lunch lady, and recently her eyesight has been failing and there’s a creak in her bones every time she walks and her fingers feel thick and clumsy and like a stranger to herself every time she picks up a spoon. Maybe the food she cooks has been getting worse because her body has been betraying herself, like this.

            If this keeps up, she could get fired.

            She sits up in her bed in restless horror, and outside the night stars flicker like they’re exploding in reverse.

– 

            She tries harder. There isn’t anything else to do. Being Casper High’s lunch lady is the only thing she’s ever known, her at age fifty-one and single with no husband or children, and no grandkids of her own. Her job was her life, and she wasn’t going to give it up just because her body was leaving her behind.

            If she can’t measure out the salt properly, she gets one of the kids to do it for her. She pays them five bucks each time, and they help her measure out the exact amount of salt she needs for her casserole whilst she busies herself cutting the chicken somewhere else.

            If she can’t read the words on the food labels, she gets a magnifying glass and squints at each one painstakingly, slowly, to double check that the ingredients she would be using were accurate and that shouldn’t mix sugar and salt up by mistake. She gets up two hours early to make time for her to do this, and she leaves two hours later than she does organizing and packing up at the end of the day to make sure everything was as organized and as neat as it could be, even as her joints creak and crease and her backache worsens her pain and her headache. 

            She asks around about what sort of food that the children would like to eat. Nine kids out of ten say they want more meat in the menu – too much veggies, and they wanted their dessert in bigger and better portions. 

            She is dismayed, but if this is what the kids want, this is what they will get. She makes veggies optional. She includes bigger portions of meat, and her desserts become more regular.      

            All the effort she puts in pays off. Complaints stop circulating the cafeteria and school halls. People start praising the food that she cooks, again, and about how The Lunch Lady was kind and gave them exactly what they wanted, and how the food was better now (namely because there was more meat with it). They smile at her when they pass her lunch counter. One of them even yelled out “you’re the best!” once when he walked past her counter to sit with the other jockies.

            When he did that, she smiled bright and happy with all her teeth, even as vision swims a little bit and her head pounds with the headache that’s been there for a week. She hasn’t slept well for a few weeks now, but that’s okay, because her efforts were paying off, and she was going to be able to keep her job. There would no new menu changes, and everything would be okay.

–

            Only of course, it isn’t, and three weeks after things had gone back to normal she gets the news that there was going to be a new menu change.

            She flips through the file, and reads the different new recipes with growing dread and panic. She has never seen these recipes before. She has never made them, and she has never learnt them, and how on earth was she supposed to make something that she has never seen before for lunch? The menu only came in _today_ ; lunch was only in a few hours, and at her capabilities she was never going to learn the new menu in time. Her eyesight had been getting worse, her back problems nowhere better, and nowadays her fingers tremble so hard when she tries to measure out the milk that half of it usually ends up splashing down her front. She _couldn’t_ be able to learn the new menu in time.

            With a determined suck of air she decides to look for Mr Ronalds and ask about the new menu change, explain that she couldn’t possibly cook any of these for today’s lunch, and maybe ask for Mr Ronalds to keep the original menu as it is – because the kids love it, and there really didn’t need to be much of a change, the food was good and healthy and wholesome and the kids all ate them right up.

            So she shuffles slowly down towards the principal’s office, her feet hurting at every step and her eyes swimming at every movement she makes, but she continues walking onwards and soon finds herself in front of Mr Ronalds’ office, and after that in front of Mr Ronalds himself.

            He glances at her from behind his oak desk, and there was something almost uncomfortable in his expression. “Yes, Mallory?” He asks.

            She wets her lips. “It’s about the new menu change,” she blurts out, forgetting even a proper greeting, forgetting about everything else, as she lays the menu file on his desk with shaking, wrinkly, spotted blue-veined hands. “This only came in today, and lunch is only a few hours away, and I am so very sorry Mr Ronalds, but there is no possible way for me to learn this so quickly–“

            “You wouldn’t have to, Mallory,” Mr Ronalds reassures her in the midst of her sentence, just as she was working herself up into a fit, her voice growing more and more frantic with her words tripping over themselves with every second.

            “Oh.” It took her a second to process this, but when she did, she was abruptly relieved, grateful. It had all just been a misunderstanding. “If that’s the case, Mr Ronalds, may I suggest there not be a menu change at all? The children love the old menu as it is, and I honestly see no reason why we would have to–“    

            Her voice abruptly cuts off as she spies the look on Mr Ronalds face: uncomfortable, regretful, and impatient all at once. The silence in the air once occupied by her voice hung in between the both of them in his well-lit office, whispering along his bookshelves, his files, his chair.

            “You see, Mallory,” he says finally, uncomfortably, weaving his fingers together as he leans forward to rest his elbows on the table, looking her straight in the eye, “along with the menu change we are also hiring a new… lunch lady.”

            Suddenly the world seems to shrink in around her; she gasps for breath as she stumbles back, her hands against his door. “You’re firing me?” She asks, and her voice sounds so much frailer and weaker than she remembered, when had she ever sounded so frail?

            “Don’t take it personally, Mallory,” Mr Ronalds hastily tries to reassure her, “it’s not that you aren’t a fantastic cook – it’s just, it’s just that you’re getting old, and it’s probably time you should retire, and take care of yourself and your health – and we’ve always thought about a menu change, but with you, at your age,” he waves uncomfortably at her, “We didn’t think you’d be up to, to learning new recipes, per se.

            “We have a nice pension all set out for you, ready to be transferred into your bank, and it’s a rather tidy sum, even if I do say so myself.”

            Her head reels, but she tries hard to put herself together. “I don’t need to retire,” she says stubbornly, as she pulls herself together to stand firm in front of Mr Ronalds with shaky legs. “I am perfectly healthy. I don’t need a pension. I love this job, I don’t need to retire, and I am perfectly alright.”

            Mr Ronalds looks at her with something akin to regret in his eyes. “Mallory, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’s all been settled.”

            She thinks her world is ending. This was all that she had in her life, and without it, where would she be now? She stares at Mr Ronalds, and her voice was quavering desperately when she asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

            Mr Ronalds looks away almost guiltily. “You were so dedicated to the kitchen,” he answers. “I didn’t know how to tell you, and I thought I’d give you as much time with your kitchen as possible for the last two months you’d be here.” 

            Two months. This had been decided two months ago. And she had _never been told._   

            She grabs onto the door with her hands again, as the world feels like its spinning out of control. “The children,” she tries again, her vision blurry as she tries to focus at Mr Ronalds, “the children like me, and they like my cooking. You can’t fire me!”

            And Mr Ronalds face was almost regretful, but impatience mars his features as he leans forward. “That’s because of the recent ludicrous menu things you have done in the kitchen! You making vegetables optional to the children, and what with increasing the amount of dessert – and what’s this I hear about the increasing portions of meat? You can’t do that, Mallory, its unhealthy for the children!”

            “The children like it,” she cries out, yelling at Mr Ronalds with all she has in her old frail body – that reminds her, she hasn’t really been sleeping well or going for her health checkups recently, she should go for one soon, “the children like meat, and it’s good for them, there’s nothing wrong with that!”

            She huffs and she pants, and she is wracked with gasps as she tries to get her breath back from her outburst. Her knees are shaking. This can’t be happening. Mr Ronalds only stares at her silently from across the room from behind his glasses, and says nothing.

            The silence between them is thick and curdled like sour milk, and she can feel her world falling apart.

            “I’m sorry, Ms Mallory,” he says quietly, before he turns around in his chair. “But please pack up your things and move out by lunch-time.”      

            She stands stock-still in his office for a moment, before suddenly she is out of the door and running as fast as her weak legs can carry her to the kitchen, her kitchen, she has to see it again, maybe this wasn’t real and it was all a bad dream, and if she sees her kitchen again she knows it’ll be alright and she’ll wake up with her health back up and the menu changed back to what it always was.

            She burst through the swinging doors and trips over the linoleum floor, and crashes headfirst into the food boxes stacked up neatly at the side and goes sprawling all over the floor. Pathetic. It was that stupid menu change. If that menu hadn’t been changed she still would’ve been able to kept her job, stay here forever, and continue serving the kids the food they all liked the best – meat, yes, that was it, meat, the children loved meat and it was good for her and for them –

            The world was swirling around her eyes. She touches one papery cheek and realises that back when her vision was blurry it wasn’t because of tears, no, no, her cheeks are perfectly wrinkled and dry, and she lifts up a hands from the floor and gazes at it, and just beyond the gaps of her fingers she sees her kitchen, her twenty year’s worth of work, and when was the last time she had seen a doctor? She doesn’t know, she doesn’t remember, and she knew she’d always had health problems before, but for now it doesn’t seem so important, the world was swirling black around her and she just wanted to go to sleep, but no, the menu change, and meat, the _stupid accursed_ menu change that should _never happen_ and meat –

–

            She dies all alone on the school cafeteria’s kitchen floor, and she isn’t discovered until the new lunch lady walks in through the swinging doors and screams.    

 

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think The Lunch Lady looks like a Mallory. It’s not the most suitable name for her, to me, but it's the closest. 
> 
> I’ll be honest I was a little uninspired when I was writing this piece. I tried to cover all aspects of The Lunch Lady’s traits when I invented her backstory: her obsession with menu changes and meat, her ability to change from gentle and grandmotherly to ferocious ghost in a nanosecond and, of course, why she is even known as “The Lunch Lady”. 
> 
> Not sure if some of the things I put in here are accurate to the year, by the way, so if there’s anything wrong don’t hesitate to tell me :) (That goes for grammar errors too I make a lot of those.) 
> 
> I’ll be doing this series according to the appearance of the ghosts according to the episodes, so next up would be the Box Ghost. Stay tuned! (Actually, don’t; I’m an erratic updater.)
> 
> Please rate and review! It would make my day ^^


	2. watch the sun sink down low

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was a small man in a big world, but then what else is new. –– The Box Ghost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second time I’m writing this I am sobbing. The Box Ghost is hard to write for. 
> 
> Technically I shouldn’t be writing this since school has already started for me but the workload hasn’t really set in yet so I think this should be fine /squints/

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He was known as Barry in his previous life.

            Barry Baxter, and it was almost as painfully ordinary as a name could be, but that was just what he was. (Painfully ordinary, that is.) He was born into an average family with two working parents and a little brother, and grew up in a fairly average and normal life. His parents always made enough that they were able to get what they needed, but never enough that they would be able to afford any luxuries.   

            When he grew up he got himself a job at a seaside warehouse stacking boxes together and loading them at the docks, and it seems that was how his life was going to go till the end of his days.

            Despite that, Barry loved his job. It wasn’t any big-shot gig, but Barry worked hard and liked what he was doing. The hours were long, but Barry worked hard, and after a good day’s work when he was allowed to sit at the port with a good ham sandwich and a flask of tea and watch the sun set in the horizon, he thinks that life couldn’t get any better than this.

            He takes another bite out of his sandwich, and grins.

            “Beware!” He yells suddenly to a group of seagulls flocking nearby as he raises his arms dramatically and mimes lunging at their direction, and the seagulls all flew up in a flurry of white feathers and frightened squawks as he watches. 

            He swings his legs over the grainy sea-salty of the port, and grins wide with all his teeth.

- 

            The next day he shows up to work bright and early in the morning, and he walks through the doors with a big grin on his face. 

            Well. He was exactly on time, actually, but punctual was punctual, and definitely a lot better than being late.

            He walks up to one of his other co-workers in the warehouse, a tall, blond, beefy man wearing a shredded singlet and with stubble round his jaw, and unceremoniously slaps him on the back.

            “Good morning! How may I, Barry Baxter, be of assistance?” He asks loudly, dramatically, puffing up his chest and sucking in his slightly thick stomach. His voice was dopey, grating in a boy-man way, and he stretches his vowels in all the wrong places so that he sounds loud, overdrawn and overbearing. He was all funny goofy in-your-face obnoxious. 

            And his fellow warehouse worker barely even reacts. This was just how Barry was; all annoying and loud and the butt of everyone’s jokes in not-always a kind way, but he was so sincere in his dramatics that nobody would ever tell him to stuff it. So they let him be an annoyance in his superior-inferior complexes without breathing as so much of a word, and they take care of him quietly the way one might do to a very stupid, very annoying pet.  

            Barry’s co-worker barely grunts a greeting before he jerks a thumb towards a large stack of cardboard boxes in a corner. “These need moving to the loading dock onto the ship before the day ends today. Hop to it.” 

            Barry salutes. “Aye aye!” He says. He toddles towards the boxes, before carefully gripping one at the bottom with his gloved hands and lifting it up. It wasn’t too light – but it wasn’t too heavy either. An average weight to carry, and Barry think he’ll do just fine. 

            So he huffs and he puffs along for the rest of the day, and carries boxes to and fro from the warehouse down to the loading dock where the goods ship awaits. Turns out that he doesn’t really do just fine, and after the other workers were done with their loads they had to come over to help him with his own. But with their help Barry finishes before the day ends, and as the goods ship sails away from the loading dock Barry wipes sweat off his brow, and feels proud of himself.

            “Another great job by the great, Barry Baxter!” He yells triumphantly into the sky, hands clenched into fists and up in the air as he stands at the edge of the dock with his face to the setting sun, dark hair sweat-sticky on his forehead and messy under his blue knit hat.

             As the orange-gold sunlight beams past his face he casts a silhouette on the ground, and he is neither heroic nor inspiring. Against the sunlight he is a small shadow of a man in his black worker boots and overalls and short and stout stature, and he does not inspire. But he grins stupid wide in his pride and is so caught up in his own small achievement in such a huge huge world that he looks big, almost for a moment.

            But then the moment is gone and he is old Barry Baxter again, the goofy annoying situationally-oblivious man that all the workers know, and as he totters up to them and slings an arm over their shoulders and breathes all into their personal space, they all go off for dinner.

            It was just routine.

– 

            He is heading home after his dinner, and it is already late. The stars hung themselves low in the sky, and he whistles out-of-tune from between his teeth. Hands in his overall pockets, a look of smugness on his face, he is congratulating himself on a job well done today. 

            Just before he rounds the corner to the warehouse where he plans on bidding his co-workers goodbye, he hears his own name, amongst the crackling of the small campfire that some of his fellow workers builds every night as they stay up late talking under the stars. Barry stops, and freezes.

            “Why would my own co-workers be talking about me, Barry Baxter?” he whispers to himself, frowning, uncomprehending, and he presses himself flat to the wall as he strains to hear the conversation floating around the corner to reach his ears. 

            “All I’m saying is,” –and Barry recognises the voice, it was the one who had tsk-ed behind him today when he stopped for a second to catch his breath –“don’t you think that Barry sometimes is, you know, annoying?”

            An uncomfortable silence echoes around the warm crackle of campfire, and Barry is frozen.

            Silent murmurs uncomfortably echoes around the campfire, and Barry hears rustling as people nod, or shake, or nod their heads. Nobody spoke for a long time, and when someone did, it was the uncertain, hesitant, slightly guilty voice of a person who felt like what he was going to say was going to be betrayal. 

            “Well, sometimes.”

            Barry hears this, and silently walks away. 

–

            For the next few days, he is quiet and withdrawn, and he does not pour as much of himself into his work anymore. He still shows up on time, but the warehouse almost echoes from the absence of his sound. Almost.

            The other workers all wonder what is going on, but nobody says a word.

– 

            The fifth day after Barry’s quiet withdrawal he sits down alone at the edge of the port again, but this time he hears someone walk up beside him and sit down. He does not glance the intruder’s way; rather he concentrates on staring into the sea green spangles of the water down below. 

            “Hey,” the voice to the left of him speaks up, and it is low, rough-smooth with a slight drawl, “the other guys and I have noticed that you’ve been feeling kinda… low, lately. Did something happen?”

            “Oh nothing,” Barry mutters, kicking his legs forward as they dangled over the water, “just the discovering of the fact that everybody here hates me, Barry Baxter, that’s all.”

            “Hate you?” The voice beside him asks, surprised, and Barry steals a glance to his left; it was his co-worker with the stubble round his chin and the blond hair that reached his shoulders, and Barry thinks he might’ve been there at the campfire that night, too. He turns away.

            “Yeah,” he mutters, hands clamping on the wooden port as he leans forward to stare into the water, “five days ago, at night, around the campfire? Someone said that I, Barry Baxter, was annoying, and then everybody agreed.” In the setting light he slumps forward in his misery, all poor posture and poor stature and even poorer expression, and his blue knit hat gets pulled down low over his brows as he stares miserably into the water. His co-worker beside him is silent, and he says nothing as he stares at the sun sinking orange-gold low over at the horizon.

            When the sky was dark in its light and the air around them was still, Barry heard a sigh, and his co-worker finally spoke up.

            “Look,” he says slowly, awkwardly, “I know you heard what you heard that night but, well, we don’t hate you.” 

            Barry glances up at him, confused. “But all of you said–“ 

            “I know what you heard,” he repeats, rubbing the back of his neck with one of his hands, “but despite what we said, we don’t hate you.” 

            “…You called me annoying,” Barry pointed out.

             His co-worker shrugs. “Well, is there anybody who ever isn’t?” He leans backwards on his arms, stares up at the sky, and exhales. 

            He has tanned, weathered lines etched onto his face; he’s been here the longest, Barry remembers, the longest out of all of them and much more experienced compared to Barry’s two years of working in the warehouse.

            Barry suddenly feels very, very small.

            They both of them don’t speak again for a while, and Barry twiddles with his thumbs; his co-workers stares up at the sky and tipped his head back. After a while, he sighs. 

            “Look, we said that you were annoying sometimes, but we like you. You’re sincere in your work, and you work probably harder than anybody else. We respect that.” He glances over at Barry once, before he tilts his head back up to the sky. 

            “You’re a good person, Barry. We don’t hate you.”

            Barry stares with his mouth hanging open, before he feels his lips stretch into a small smile.

            “Really?” He asks, hesitatingly, timidly.           

            The man next to him simply glances at him once again, before he heaves himself up. He puts a hand on Barry’s head, and says, “Continue working hard, kid. You’re still a rookie, compared to some of us here, but you’ve got it going for you,” before walks back up the pier, towards the warehouse. He does not glance back.

            Barry tilts his head back down to stare at the now dark-black spangles of the water in the night, and grins.

– 

            “Are you sure, Barry?” His fellow warehouse workers asked, a frown creasing their features as they hovered near the doors, a look of uncertainty flitting across their hard-worn features. “Are you sure you don’t want one of us to stay with you?”

            Barry looks up from where he had been stacking up boxes, and puffs up his chest. “Do not worry about me! I will be all right! It is just a little bit of extra work, and I will be done! You go on ahead!” His voice is as loud and as dramatic as ever; the same pauses in all the wrong places, and he’s finally back to his old self, again.  

            The other workers exchanged glances before they finally nodded. “Alright then, we’re going now. Be careful, Barry,” they called out gruffly before they closed the doors. 

            Barry stays grinning at the door until they finally slammed it shut, and he rolls his shoulders and prepares to go to work. He’s putting in overtime today, to make up for the five days where he didn’t really do his work properly. There was a bit of extra boxes left to organize and tidy – Barry thinks he’d better hop to it. He’s only got a few hours to spare, and he needs to catch the last bus home before it’s too late.

            So he starts lifting the boxes up and stacking them into neat columns, and as time went on he finds that he is huffing and puffing and the boxes are getting heavier, but still he continues working without so much as a rest. He wasn’t as strong as the other workers, but that’s okay, because he could work up the muscle over time.

            He has the rest of life to do it; he has time. 

            He finishes his work just before the clock strikes ten, and he is sweaty and tired, but he is pleased. He takes off his gloves and wipes his hands on his overalls; he pulls his blue knit hat on.

            Tugging his gloves back on, he whistles as he makes his way out of the door, and plans on coming in early the next day as well, to put in some extra hours. He was still far behind the other workers, so he’ll have to put in the extra effort to make sure he doesn’t fall behind.

            Then maybe some years from now he would be tall and beefy, with enough muscles to carry four boxes at once, and maybe even a scar or two somewhere from an accident. Maybe an injured eye? He knew someone who injured his eye from a warehouse incident before.           

            So when he turns around and finds the stacks of boxes that he didn’t organize steadily enough falling in his direction, his first instinct wasn’t to do anything but to dumbly stand there. He knows the boxes are heavy; he’d carried them just now, and so many falling in his direction was probably going to kill him.

            He couldn’t really believe it. His mind flashes back to his plans for tomorrow, for the next two years of his life, for the next twenty – he’d thought he could go on working in the warehouse forever.

            The first box hits him headfirst.

            He just wanted to do his job.  

  

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Box Ghost is incredibly difficult to write a decently serious story for. He was created as a gag character – it was hard to think up a serious death storyline for him. 
> 
> Also wow, I see why The Box Ghost and The Lunch Lady are put together as a couple. They’re quite similar. 
> 
> I’m not all that pleased with this, but I think it suits, so there? Also The Box Ghost looks like a Barry to me and you cannot convince me otherwise. Also how do I type out his speech, on paper I just can’t seem to make it obnoxious enough.
> 
> Someone tell me if throwing in made-up characters in this story or assigning the ghosts their names if they have none is weird, though – just give me your honest opinion, because I’m not too sure on doing that myself. 
> 
> Please rate and review!


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